With census reports showing that one out of four people in the world is Muslim - and with that population growing as Muslims immigrate and reproduce everywhere, extremists continue to demonstrate what could be commonplace under Islamic law on Main Street one day. So tell me why no one seems to care?
Like many extremist groups, Somalia’s hardline al Shabaab group is cracking down on residents who do not follow a strict form of Sharia Islamic law, now publicly whipping women who wear bras, the Times of India reported. Read more
This is a great peice from the Wall Street Journal that is worth passing on. Enjoy!
Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, “This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program.”
If that’s true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%. Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted.
Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best “the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day’s gasoline use.” Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.
The basic fallacy of cash for clunkers is that you can somehow create wealth by destroying existing assets that are still productive, in this case cars that still work. Under the program, auto dealers were required to destroy the car engines of trade-ins with a sodium silicate solution, then smash them and send them to the junk yard. As the journalist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic, “Economics in One Lesson,” you can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.
In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.
With this recession dragging on the more I speak with HR personnel the more I loathe them. They have absolutely no idea what to look for and how to discern talent and how a skill set can fit a position.
Recently I received a call from an HR person looking to speak to me about a New Business Development position. My background has ERP experience (technology) and I have over 11 years in B to B experience at the highest level. The position in question was in technology, and while it varied from my experience, was not too far removed. I pride myself on my ability to generate revenue and adapt to a new industry, as I have done so a few times in my career with great success.
This HR IDIOT starts me out with “well, I reviewed your resume and don’t see a fit but maybe you can tell me something about yourself that doesn’t appear on your resume”. How in God’s name do you respond to a person whose sole purpose on this planet is to oblige law so to give the appearance of even handedness. They have no practical experience and fall under the “Those who can do, do. Those who can’t teach”. But in this case it’s “those who can’t work in HR”.
Well, I politely answered in a manner fitting a pea brained individual simply filling a position mandated by the state. However, had I known how the rest of this phone interview was going to go, and knowing that she just didn’t understand how my skill set translated quite nicely, I wouldn’t answered something like this: “I dont’ think someone of my level should have to qualify myself to someone who cannot assimilate the simplest of skill set transference and business concepts”.
Then I should have hung up on her and tried to call back someone in upper management. And while I know this would’ve been a fruitless exercise, I would’ve been spared the embarrassment of being castrated by some pea brained moron who should be the one on my side of the phone asking me for a job.
